Tomlinson Hill

by Chris Tomlinson

  Sturgis intervened in a case involving Churchill Jones. He sent an order to Jones in April to pay his laborers or face arrest, and Jones complied. But then, on June 15, 1867, the freedmen sharecropping on Falls Plantation complained that Jones had refused to provide the former slaves a way to protect their share of the cotton, and as a result, they lost everything. Sturgis logged the results of his investigation:

  I went to the plantation of said Jones on the 23rd June to examine this case and find the cotton as stated rotting in the pens, but upon examining the evidence find that it is the fault of the Freedmen, they having drawn from the planter surplus of money to nearly the amount of their crop. [They then] came into Marlin and traded for it a second time giving a mortgage upon it for the same, when it really didn’t belong to them.

  I further find that there were two gin stands on the Falls place, all the time at their service, and one put upon the Blackman place, before they had got through picking, all of which were at the service of the Freedmen. And that those Freedmen who wished to ginned, picked and deseeded their cotton with [it]. The planters and their complainants could have done the same.

  My impression is that I ought to punish the Freedmen for obtaining goods under false pretenses upon complaint of the merchants.62

  The merchants, though, were not necessarily innocent victims. Whites set up shops on the larger plantations to sell blacks shoddy provisions, poor livestock, and useless goods at high prices. These store owners, colloquially called “buzzards” because of how they exploited blacks, provided cash advances and credit at outrageous interest rates. The store owner usually worked with the landowner to make sure the debts were deducted from a worker’s pay and the two would share the profits, while leaving the worker with next to nothing. While this may not have been the case on Jones’s plantation, it was a common practice.63

  Sturgis reported at least one success in helping planters better appreciate the bureau and the freedmen’s labor. He convinced 257 freedmen to move from South Carolina to Falls County and supervised one-year contracts between fifteen of them and Sarah’s nephew, Nicholas Stallworth. While Sturgis had to intervene in April to force Stallworth to pay wages on time, he reported on June 30, 1867, that he had settled up the contracts and both Stallworth and the freedmen were happy:

  I today made settlements with the South Carolina hands and what they thought at first was in me a very arbitrary order [that one half of wages each month be held until the end of the contract by the planters so that they might have some money at the end of the year] as it accommodated. Each month they begin to realize its advantages and some be more interested in how much they were to reserve.

  Since my return from Austin I have visited a number of plantations on which these people are employed. When they first came here they were badly clad, poor, half starved-looking creatures, I now find it just the reverse and all contented and happy, though they have to work hard. But they came here for that purpose.64

  Freedmen filed on average one complaint a day against white planters, and Sturgis was perpetually issuing orders for whites to stop misbehaving. He had a company of black cavalrymen in Marlin for protection and enforcement, and he used them constantly. Sometimes he threatened to send troops if a planter didn’t shape up.65

  For the most part, though, bureau agents like Sturgis could do little but document abuses. Most planters used the Black Codes and state law to legally avoid paying their workers in spite of the bureau. White Texans may not have won the war or maintained their slaveholdings, but within a year of the Civil War’s end, they had created a new system for cheap labor and social control over blacks.66

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  The murder of Negroes is so common as to render it impossible to keep an accurate account of them.

  —Gen. Joseph J. Reynolds, 1868

  Northern Republicans realized that Texas and other southern states could not be trusted to protect the civil rights of blacks. On March 2, 1867, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act, which declared none of the new governments in the former Confederacy legal. Republicans had lost patience with President Johnson’s strategy for Reconstruction and were imposing their own plans. Congress placed Texas in the Fifth Military District, along with Louisiana, and Gen. Philip Sheridan took command. He put Gen. Charles Griffin in charge of implementing in Texas what southerners came to call Radical Reconstruction.1

  Griffin’s first order of business was to supervise the election of delegates to yet another state convention in order to write a Texas constitution that would conform with the U.S. Constitution. Congress also required the state legislature to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment before Texas could rejoin the Union. To accomplish this, Griffin excluded high-ranking officials in the Confederacy from voting, or serving in political office, unless he provided special dispensation.2

  At first, Griffin allowed state and local officials to remain in their posts as long as they cooperated. He didn’t trust any of the former rebels, though. He set new rules ending the widespread and common abuse of civil rights and giving Union officers the power to intervene in any legal case where they observed injustice. Griffin also required prospective jurors to take the “Ironclad Oath,” pledging that they had never voluntarily aided the Confederacy, and he required that freedmen begin serving on juries.3 Many state judges simply closed their courts rather than comply.4

  Griffin also set new voting rules and placed Unionists in control of voter registration. This cleared the way for the Republican party to counterbalance the Democratic party, which was controlled by former Confederate leaders. Texas Unionists who had fled at the war’s outset returned to the Lone Star State to build a biracial party that could defeat the Democrats and ensure a state government loyal to the Union.5

  Sturgis supervised the division of Falls County into four precincts, which at the time were called “beats.” He appointed three Union soldiers, two recently returned white Unionists and one African-American to the voter-registration board representing Marlin. In western Falls County, he named Benjamin Shields, the old Alabama Whig, and William Etheridge, who had fled his farm near Tomlinson Hill. The last representative for western Falls County was Churchill Jones, whom Sturgis initially listed as an “unconditional Union man.” But Sturgis later struck through that designation with his pen and left Churchill as a voting official even though he still did not have his citizenship. Sturgis’s appointees registered 366 whites and 794 blacks for the election to send delegates to the new state constitutional convention.6

  Republicans sent Union League organizers to Texas to recruit blacks into the party, and league chapters across the state produced Texas’s first African-American political leaders. White and African-American Unionists met in Houston on July 4, 1867, to organize the new Republican Party of Texas. The party platform promised to reform homestead laws to protect blacks and guarantee black children access to public schools. To attract white members, the party promised to drive all former rebels from state government, but Unionists knew that Republican power relied primarily on black voters going to the polls.7

  On July 19, Republicans in Washington helped Texas Unionists by passing the Third Reconstruction Act, which gave local military commanders the power to remove elected officials if they did not cooperate with martial law. Griffin removed Governor Throckmorton eleven days later and replaced him with Elisha Pease, who had lost the 1866 election. Pease asked Griffin to replace every officeholder in the state with Unionists, but Griffin insisted on handling each case individually. By September, he’d replaced dozens of judges and city officials and eventually removed all of the state’s principal officeholders.8

  Another yellow fever epidemic in Galveston, though, took Griffin’s life on September 15. Washington replaced him with Gen. Joseph J. Reynolds, who continued the political purge until ordered to stop by higher authorities.9

  White planters reacted to the purge by stepping up attacks on blacks and Unionists, focusing on slowing black voter
registration and the Union League’s expansion. Even with military officers spread out across the state, Union troops remained too few to prevent attacks and could only react after the fact. Republicans could do little to stop the violence against African-Americans, as pro-Confederacy whites controlled most of the wealth and social authority in Texas.10

  A disappointing cotton crop in 1867 added to white aggravation and violence. The cotton worm had returned and a wet fall kept workers out of the fields, allowing weeds and grass to choke the plants. The rain caused a devastating portion of the crop to rot on the plant before freedmen could harvest it. White landowners took out their frustrations on the black workers, claiming that the low yield proved again that blacks belonged in chains and required corporal punishment. Farmworkers suffered murder, rape, mutilation, and beatings. Landowners also attacked white Republicans, whom they blamed for organizing blacks and making them “uppity.” Planters warned black workers that if they joined the Union League or voted Republican, they’d never work again.11

  INTIMIDATION CAMPAIGN FAILS

  The state registered 60,445 whites and 49,550 African-Americans to vote, or about 50 percent of the white voting population and 89 percent of the black. White voters outnumbered blacks by eleven thousand, but twelve thousand of them were Unionists, giving the Republican party a clear advantage if they could turn out the vote. Where blacks were the majority or where the Freedmen’s Bureau held sway, blacks registered in higher numbers and whites in lower. In northern counties, where white planters dominated, few blacks registered.12

  General Reynolds ordered an election for delegates to the constitutional convention from February 10–14, 1868. Throckmorton, the former Democratic governor, argued that whites should vote against the convention because martial law was preferable to accepting equal rights for blacks. Other conservative Democrats argued that whites should attend the convention and write another constitution, one that rejected black equality. Both factions agreed the North would eventually grow tired of military rule over Texas and relent in trying to change Texas’s white culture.13

  Democrats, though, suffered a massive defeat. Roughly 89 percent of registered black voters turned out and cast 36,392 votes, along with 7,750 white Unionists. Democrats mustered only 10,623 votes. Unionists filled eighty-two of ninety-three seats at the constitutional convention. Of the eighty-two Republicans, sixty-four were Unionist Texans. Only nine African-Americans served as delegates, eight of them former slaves. The remaining nine delegates were whites who had moved to Texas after the war.14 The convention began in June 1867, and Republicans splintered between conservatives and radicals. Despite their majority, Republicans couldn’t even agree on a presiding officer. The process of drafting the new Texas constitution dragged on until February 6, 1869, when the convention dissolved in failure.15

  THE KU KLUX KLAN COMES TO TEXAS

  National Democrats wanted to win the 1868 presidential race, so the party made opposition to Reconstruction and black suffrage their key issues. To draw blacks away from Republicans, Democratic leaders offered jobs and protection from the rising violence. They held barbecues for African-American farmhands, and in return for joining a black Democratic political club, the Democrats promised to give them written certificates that would protect them from white violence as long as they didn’t vote Republican. Blacks who did not join faced harassment, intimidation, beatings, and robbery. Democratic newspapers encouraged local businesses to place Republicans on blacklists. Editors proclaimed that allowing blacks to vote would lead to the “Africanization of Texas” and give former slaves power over their masters.16

  As these Democratic clubs spread across the state, the Ku Klux Klan followed. The Klan had suppressed black political participation in other states, so its arrival in Texas had only been a matter of time. While no records directly connect Democratic clubs with Klan activities, circumstantial evidence is strong. The Galveston News proclaimed early on that Democrats needed a secret organization to counteract the Union League and to establish “a purer social atmosphere and as the last hope for the maintenance of the supremacy of the white race in this Republic.”17

  According to John Hereford, a Texas Klansman who testified in Washington about a disputed congressional race, the Klan supported the Democratic party:

  There were two objectives, one was a political object, in order to defeat the radical [Republican] party, that was the first. The second was, the people of that county did it for self-defense and the majority of good men of the county belonged to it.… It had a name. I don’t remember the name it was called by the organization, by outsiders it was called Ku-Klux, those who called it so were principally woman and children and negroes.

  The object was not to vote for any except a Democrat of the first water. The organization was in part, so that each man could know his neighbor, and whether or not he was a white Democrat, and to establish a concert of action among the Democratic Party.18

  William Lewis, a former slave who campaigned for the Republican ticket, testified that whenever he stopped in a town to speak to freedmen, they warned him that his life was in danger. Lewis, who worked as a city policeman in the town of Jefferson, described escaping from a white mob in Denton County:

  As near as I recollect about 25; they were generally armed with revolvers. The first I saw of them they had Col. Stokes [a Republican] surrounded. The first I heard they say were ordering him to leave town, that no damned Radical should stay there, and that if he did not leave immediately, they would kill him.…

  I heard one say, “What will we do with the damned nigger that came from Jefferson?” Another one replied, “Tar and feather him and burn him.”19

  In Millican, a town north of Houston, Klansmen marched through the black part of town as a show of force on July 15, 1868. The freedmen fought back and drove the whites away, at least for a while. When the Klansmen returned, they killed twenty-five black men, including George Brooks, a Methodist preacher who had established the local Union League. When blacks didn’t show up for a Democratic party barbecue in Jefferson on July 4, three hundred whites attacked black residents and white Unionists until they fled the town. Groups identified as Klansmen also attacked Freedmen’s Bureau schools in Anderson, Fort Bend, Harrison, and Red River counties, driving away the teachers. Local authorities did nothing to stop the violence or to prosecute those responsible.20

  That summer, Freedmen’s Bureau agent Charles Haughn reported that two Klan gangs, known locally as “the Families of the South,” roamed the Waco area in McLennan County. At least one of the groups also operated in Falls County.21 In reading the History of Falls County, written in 1947, I was shocked to see the Klan’s activities explained like this:

  In the confusion, ignorant Negros, not knowing how to use their new freedom, further confused economic conditions by failing to work, looking to the government for “forty acres and a mule” or something else and controlled by radicals. They thrust themselves obnoxiously into activities where they were of no use or actual hindrances. The Ku Klux Klan showed up in Texas, although, apparently not connected with similar organizations east of the Mississippi. The Texas bands existed briefly and were about the only means the white people had to making it known they had a few rights in the land. The bands depended for effect by appealing to the superstitions of the Negroes, more than upon violence.22

  But in 1868, General Reynolds took a very different view and warned his headquarters in Washington of the growing problem:

  Armed organizations, generally known as Ku-Klux Klans exist, independently or in concert with other armed bands, in many parts of Texas, but are most numerous, bold, and aggressive east of the Trinity River.

  The precise objects of the organizations cannot be readily explained, but seem, in this State, to be to disarm, rob, and in many cases murder Union men and negroes, and as occasion may offer, murder United States officers and soldiers, also to intimidate everyone who knows anything of the organization but who will not join it. T
he murder of Negroes is so common as to render it impossible to keep an accurate account of them.

  Many of the members of these bands of outlaws are transient persons in the State, the absence of railroads and telegraphs and great length of time required to communicate between remote points facilitating their devilish purposes.

  These organizations are evidently countenanced, or at least not discouraged, by a majority of the white people in the counties where the bands are most numerous. They could not otherwise exist.

  Free speech and a free press, as the terms are generally understood in other States, have never existed in Texas. In fact, the citizens of other States cannot appreciate the state of affairs in Texas without actually experiencing it. The official reports of lawlessness and crime, so far from being exaggerated, do not tell the whole truth.23

  Republicans knew that if the violence didn’t stop, black civil rights had no hope in Texas. They sent a delegation to Congress, asking it to give Governor Pease more authority to replace local officials who did not enforce the law. Congress did not act, but it did exclude from the presidential election any state that was not reconstructed, including Texas.24

  SARAH TOMLINSON AND HER FAMILY PROGRESS

  Sarah Tomlinson took the final steps to settle her husband’s estate in the fall of 1867, more than two years after his death. She asked the Falls County Probate Court on October 28 for permission to settle her land debt with her brother-in-law, Churchill Jones. Churchill agreed to take back six thousand acres of land that was adjacent to Falls Plantation, settling the balance owed on the original $10,000 mortgage, as well as the $412.34 debt she owed on two smaller loans.

  A week later, she sold twenty-five cotton bales to John Dean and Co. for $858.72. She then sold fifty-five bales to a trader named Holeley for $2,209.85. Her sheep produced 490 pounds of wool for $70.75 and the farm produced 153 bushels of corn that sold for $97.40. Yet this was still not enough to pay off the remainder of her debt. She and her attorney, J. D. Oltorf, went back to court on November 23.25 The court could not compel her to sell her land under the state’s homestead laws. Sarah also asked the court to allow her to keep some other assets:26